Yes, I lost my castle, which gave me some kind of defeat screen with a score, but after I got a victory screen with a different score. After a few screens (an epilogue screen, a thank you screen, etc), I was back at the main menu. I chose to reload, replayed the game from day 95 onward and successfully protected my castle, after which I also got a victory screen.
nnorgaard
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A member registered Jun 10, 2020
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Found some more bugs, though some are hard to describe repro or may be difficult to repro.
1. Sometimes tiles which are under attack by enemies remain locked in that state even after all ships are gone.
2. Some tiles in my game are messed up. They have a development on them, but the development is invisible, so it looks like Plains, however, clicking shows the real development. When the tile is destroyed by an enemy, the plains tile does not disappear, as in visually there is still a sprite drawn on that tile, but the ships pass through. I would guess that a zombie plains sprite is being drawn on top of the real sprite. I can share with you my save file in which at least two tiles are like this if you tell me how. If I had to guess, I'd say this happened during the save/reload roundtrip.
3. I discovered that enemy ships will stop and fire at the castle if they are in the wrong row. That's neat, but something is wrong with the mortar AI when this happens. I was seeing a red mortar square shooting at the castle when there were no enemies in range. I assume that meant a mortar was shooting at it, but couldn't catch a mortar actually being fired at the castle (I could have missed it).
4. Whenever you "Continue" a game, you get the level up (new population reached) screen and a beginning tutorial tip.
5. While loading a continued game, it shows buttons for placing your castle and port, and to reroll the map. It should probably stay blank until loaded, or those buttons should at least by invisible+disabled.
6. Regarding a previous bug I mentioned about clicking through UI, you said that you can't click through buttons, but I've verified that I can click through the build menu, both the category tab buttons and the build buttons for each development.
7. When a damaged tile is repaired by a repair hut, the full health bar does not disappear. (Since all other tiles with full health do not have health bars, I'd assume when healed it should disappear, if not immediately, at least after a couple seconds)
I passed the Day 75 raid, now I'm waiting. I don't know what else is supposed to happen. I didn't get any notification saying I won or that there was another wave scheduled. It's currently Day 91. I'm actually letting it run right now as I write this because sadly there isn't anything else I can do for my island... I'm maxed out on space and resources.
If the food/satisfaction/workers dilemma was intentional, then that's fine. I think it is part of the economic challenge. Consider making a tip pop up in tutorial or something telling them to delete a building to free up workers when they're in that position since at first it can be kind of frustrating.
On silly things like the health bar being above the tile, you can throw out that feedback if you don't like it. No need to "consider alternatives". None of my suggestions need to be "looked into further" unless you really like them - I appreciate the politeness but don't wear yourself out doing things you don't like. Anyway, I enjoy your game, good luck with it!
Hi Shad3x, I love the style and feel of the game. The mechanics are simple but lead to interesting economic and defensive situations. The game flow is pretty smooth. I have some suggestions which are mainly minor tweaks. I love indie games, and I love your project. I can tell how much you love the game, and that makes me love it even more.
Gameplay feedback:
1. Recruiting and deploying soldiers from individual barracks is tedious and doesn't scale well. There might have been a design goal for making each barracks perform individually, but I think it would be a great improvement to allow all barracks' soldiers to pool together for the sake of soldier population and deployment. Similarly, I think aggregating trade ships would be nice. You could have clicking on one trade ship (or a trade icon in the UI) could open a trade menu that expands the more ports you have. This would help with avoiding the problem of scale with the more ports you have, all the trading could be done from one view/dialog.
2. Waves are spread out too much, especially in the late game. Like you said responding to similar feedback above above, increasing the frequency and varying the size of the raids would be awesome. Since the waves are scheduled, you could even have some kind of a timeline graphic with waves represented as icons/shapes/ticks/etc along the timeline, with the size or type of icon representing the size of the wave. That would give the player a place to glance at to remember when the next attack is coming, see how big it will be, and remind themselves what their goal is.
3. In the mid-late game, I found resources to be imbalanced. Wood, stone, iron, and gold production were far too high for their caps, and I was constantly deadlocked between food, satisfaction, and workers. If you build things in the wrong order, you can end up stuck, where the only way out is to delete buildings. Example1: out of workers/population, place settlement, satisfaction too low to get workers, workers required to build tavern, stuck, must delete industry which lowers satisfaction or delete unsatisfied village. Example 2: out of food, place farm, gained food, not enough workers for additional farm, but still too little food for additional settlement, stuck. These economic tug-of-wars are not bad as it forces optimization, but it's annoying to always have to delete something to get out of a stuck situation. It's not obvious to the player how to get unstuck, they have to realize that they can get some workers back by deleting buildings. Before they figure it out, it can feel like being stuck. Since the economy is so rigid (building and destroying objects), I'd be wary of plague events which affect satisfaction without some more flexible economic mechanics to adapt. Building and destroying is an option if you prefer that kind of strategy (building and destroying IS kinda flexible after all), but another option is a flexible mechanic like tax rate, for example. That would allow the player to change their tax income and alter the satisfaction of their people.
Some UI/UX things:
1. Hard to find pause and menu buttons. They are taught in the tutorial, but after dismissed there's no reminder or UI indicator. When I wanted to quit, I had to alt+f4. Kudos on the autosave feature though 😅.
2. It would be great to show the income rate of the various resources. Not only is it practical, but it's satisfying 🤩 to see your income increase.
3. The health bar of a tile is above the tile, which means it visually sits on top of a different tile. I could just be an idiot, but I thought he repair tool didn't work at first because I was clicking on the wrong tile (and I was wondering how some water tiles had a health bar 😅).
4. Clearer use of the repair hut. It's not obvious you have a tool selected when you click the button, and the repair hut dialog stays awkwardly in the middle of the screen. Consider moving the repair tool next to the destroy tool and adding a repair hammer next to the cursor to indicate the tool is active. Also, it's kind of weird that a repair hut doesn't have a range. Building a single repair hut is enough for the whole island, and you have to go find it in order to activate the repair too.
5. A hotkey to dismiss menus would be great instead of having to click the window's X. I kept pressing the escape key expecting it to close windows, but was disappointed. Example windows: build menu, barracks window, repair hut window.
6. It would be a lot easier to deploy soldiers if they could be deployed from clicking on the forts themselves, rather than have to do it from an individual barracks.
7. There's no way to see if your forts are garrisoned unless you are deploying soldiers. At a glance, this makes it difficult to tell if a fort is garrisoned or not. At a minimum maybe the fort has a different appearance if it is completely empty. Or another idea is to have a row of dots or a bar segmented in fifths (next to health bar) for soldiers occupying the fort.
Feature suggestions:
1. The limit on resources is pretty low. You could add warehouse buildings which increase the storage capacity for resources. This is totally an unnecessary mechanic and could be tedious for some players if done incorrectly though, as just one more thing to manage.
2. Upgrading buildings could add a nice layer of depth as you develop more dense cities. By day 50 I had all the tiles in my island used up and needed to spend my resources on something. Settlements that contain more people, etc. Would be even more interesting if they had other features, such as your courtyards.
3. Types of enemies which behave differently and require different strategies would make the defense more interesting. Similarly different defenses may work better against different types.
4. Adding different styles of maps (like how the title screen is an archipelago) would create more replay-ability. I would encourage modes with smaller maps as these challenges tend to force more strategic play, rather than mass resource production.
All these are opinions - and your opinion is the most important. I'm sure you'll start getting lots of feedback now that you've released the game, but stay true to your vision! I can tell there is solid gameplay in your game and plenty of charm, so trust yourself!
I should also say that I myself am an aspiring video game developer (though currently just an unproductive hobbyist), and your project is very inspiring for me.
Oh, I did enjoy the game a lot! I was saving that for my feedback post I'm working on in your other thread.
With regard me not using the repair hut correctly, I misunderstood the use of the hut. I thought it repaired in some undefined area around the hut (if there is an area limit, it would be nice to have a visual range like the fort and watchtower). I didn't realize that repairing was used like a tool (like the destroy tool). Maybe if repairing is a big enough mechanic you could make the repair tool accessible near the destroy tool since they behave similarly. Otherwise, some kind of indicator that once you clicked repair that you had a tool active would be nice, such as adding a repair hammer to the cursor position or something like that.
One more bug I found:
1. The launcher doesn't respect windowed mode. Even when you select windowed mode, it launches in fullscreen. [edit] it was like that the first couple times I launched but now it respects windowed mode... I wonder if it was related to me having a resolution 1920x1080 selected (which is not available in windowed mode) when I clicked the x for windowed mode. Visually, it changed the dropdown for screen resolution to 1680 by 1050, but launched in fullscreen. However I've tried reproing this and am not able to. I'll let you know if I get a repro.
1. Can repair huts be used for anything? Using the repair feature doesn't seem to do anything, but it could be user error.
2. Repair huts cannot be destroyed, using the destroy tool just opens the repair hut dialog window.
3. Barracks dialog window can be clicked through to select different barracks (many dialog windows can be clicked through to the behind object). This happens frequently when you are recruiting and deploying soldiers.
4. When you have negative workers you cannot build anything (or trade anything, I think), including things that don't require workers (possibly by design, but it was really confusing until I figured it out).
5. Another example of UI being click-throughable is if your cursor is set to construct something, and you click in the build menu, you may build something on the tile behind where you clicked in the build menu.